NOTE: Using robot software to mass-download the site degrades the server and is prohibited. See here for more.
Find The PC Guide helpful? Please consider a donation to The PC
Guide Tip Jar. Visa/MC/Paypal accepted.

I am receiving a run-time parity error during operation of the PC, after booting

Explanation: A parity error is
occurring on the PC as it is being used. The parity error may occur consistently or
intermittently. It is also normal to see parity errors in Windows but not in DOS because
Windows exercises the memory much more than DOS does.

Diagnosis: Parity errors are often a signal that something is working incorrectly
in the system. This is commonly a problem with the memory itself, but can be caused by
many other sorts of hardware problems as well. You may be surprised at some of the
hardware problems that can lead to memory corruption, including expansion card issues,
resource conflicts, etc. This is why parity
checking is so important.

Recommendation: Look on the screen to see if the system is giving you any sort of
memory address that indicates where the parity error is occurring. Reboot the system and
see if the same address comes up again, and then reboot a third time. Take note of whether
or not the memory location changes, and then continue below:

You may be surprised to hear me say this, but if your system has been working well for a
long time, you haven't changed anything recently, and you only encountered a single parity
error, I often recommend just ignoring it. Well, don't ignore it, but don't take
any action other than seeing if it happens again, and if so, under what circumstances. The
reason is that fluke corruptions of memory occur, sometimes due to stray radiation or odd
power glitches. You may have a single error and never another one. If the error recurs, of
course, you have a problem that needs to be addressed.

There are many different possible causes of intermittent system lockups and glitches.
Many of the problems that manifest themselves as lockups,
crashes or spontaneous reboots on a non-parity system will show up on a parity system
as parity errors.